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The Seminary Bubble

Imagine an institution that requires its leaders to attend not only college, but graduate school. Imagine that the graduate school in question is constitutionally forbidden from receiving any form of government aid, that it typically requires three years of full-time schooling for the diploma, that the nature of the schooling bears almost no resemblance to the job in question, and that the pay for graduates is far lower than other professions. You have just imagined the relationship between the Christian Church and her seminaries.

Mainline churches are nearly universal in their requirement that their Priests/Pastors/Ministers/Reverends be seminary graduates, and since seminary is a graduate school, this means the students must first be successful undergraduates. So take all of the arguments about a college bubble and add at least three years of tuition cost and forgone income.

But you’re not quite done: My friend Father Jay Geisler counsels seminary students. He tells me that in his experience roughly half of matriculated students do not graduate within three years. In addition, he tells me that the living costs tend to be higher for seminary students than for undergrads because undergrads are almost never married with children, but seminary students often are. As such, dorm room type accommodations for grads will not do.

In addition, incomes for late 20- and early 30-somethings with wife and child tend to be higher than the traditional undergraduate-age student, so the opportunity costs — meaning the lost earnings — are considerably higher. Father Geisler tells me that he commonly sees young men graduate from seminary $60,000 or $70,000 in debt with few employment options other than very low-pay youth minister positions. It’s often even worse for women in conservative denominational traditions in which female ordination is still controversial.

And the prospects are worse clergy than for other forms of professional education, because there is no legal seminary requirement which stifles professional competition. If you go to medical school, you know you’ll have challenges in the job market, but at least you know you won’t be competing with non-medical school graduate physicians. Ditto for law school; it’s illegal to practice law or medicine without the requisite graduate schooling. Other professions, such as CPA and engineer, require at least the four-year diploma.

If you graduate from seminary and become an Episcopal priest, the church almost certainly required that you get the degree, but there’s no guarantee that increasingly indifferent churchgoers won’t, at the drop of a hat, leave your church and move a few blocks down the street to attend a Pentecostal, charismatic or fundamentalist church led by a high school dropout with generous dollops of the gift of gab, no school loans and probably less overhead. Interestingly enough, statistics indicate that these less “professional” churches are growing and the top-heavy cousins are rapidly shrinking.

Historian and sociologist Rodney Stark finds that the historical pattern fits the current one. Decentralized church systems with a history of less formal schooling historically outperform top-heavy ones with heavy academic requirements.

Part of this is politics. Mainline churches have largely become local versions of the Green Party at prayer. Leftie fads long ago captured the commanding heights of the established denominations. In fact, they did it through the seminaries. So, clergy moved left, members moved out, and mainline churches became mixtures of union halls, encounter groups and mausoleums.

Non-’professional’ church traditions didn’t have the luxury of indulging in ideological tourism. The ministers there live by the weekly collection plate.

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Jerry this is a wonderful article and goes hand in hand with the mission of the organization I work for. Thank you for coming out and saying it. We would love the opportunity to speak with you about this as there are better solutions for educating pastors both here in the U.S. and around the world that are technology centered rather than traditional bricks and mortar type seminaries. We are working to make seminary free in multiple languages (English, Spanish, Mandarin, Russian and Arabic). Is there a way to contact you?

Pssst. There are female seminarians. A lot of them. The fact that you fail to acknowledge this – and make it very clear that you have in mind hetero men when you think “seminarian” – simply makes everything else you say sound less informed and therefore less persuasive. In some churches the biggest demographic growth in seminarians has been among women. You may not like that — for all I know you don’t believe in women’s ordination — but then you need to make that case; otherwise you sound both biased and un-reflective. I agree that theological education. Actually, I teach at a seminary and fear that seminary education won’t survive the entire duration of my professional life, so I have plans B, C, D, and E. But really, showing such an inaccurate assumption about who seminarians are does not help your case.

There is some benefit to education in some areas, for example, economics. I wouldn’t pay much attention to someone who has little economic education. They might write columns arguing for the continuance of a booming economy when we’re already six months into a recession.

Great article. I have the privilege to work at a seminary where the professsors are all pastors serving as adjunct faculty, classes and administrative offices are in donated church space, classes are offered the evenings and early mornings, and the staff is intentionally small. The result? 39+ years of quality training for current and future Church leaders at very low tuition rates ($100/credit hour) and an incredibly diverse student body.

Thank you, Jerry, for your wise comments. Your article is a much needed critique of the system of training pastors. I am a seminary student who will graduate next month and am glad to have strong possibilites for a call. While the seminary itself isn’t always set up for the kind of “practical education” that is needed alongside the theological piece, there are other ways that this type of education is required. I have been blessed to be part of a tradition in the ELCA that has internships, field education, CPE and other ways of making sure we are equiped with the needed skills before we go into the parish. The cost and length of training, though, certainly need to be critically reviewed!

I would also like to echo the points of a previous commentor to encourage you to think about pastor ministry as no longer a calling only for men. 50% of us seminary students in the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) are women. 31% of actively serving ELCA pastors are also women. When you speak in terms of seminary students and their wives and families, not only do you forget me, but you also forget my soon to be husband and countless other spouses and partners.

Check E.D. Kain on the cost of education too, on Forbes…I have come across a lot of debate on this topic, scattered and not right on the visible surface, but for some other writing I signed up for email from the Chronicle of Higher Education — the free version has a lot of debate on the future of education and costs. But look at Kain as well. http://blogs.forbes.com/erikkain/2011/05/13/do-public-universities-still-exist/?utm_source=alertsdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20110514

The Catholic seminary generally takes 7 years to complete, maybe 5 if you have a solid theological and philosophical background.

Yes, there have been substantial consolidation of seminaries, but the number of seminarians recently started to show real signs of actual growth in the US…. never mind Africa – where the Church is literally exploding.

When cost became an issue, the Bishops generally found ways to subsidize it, and actually pay off students college loans.

You explain what a married family man would mean to the seminary system and the Bishops turn sheet white.